SHARES

The 18th Istanbul Biennial, titled The Three-Legged Cat, opens a new chapter in how large-scale contemporary art festivals can operate: not as a fortnight or a month of spectacle, but as a three-year process (2025-2027) that invites reflection, collaboration and incremental engagement. Curated by Christine Tohmé, this edition spans eight venues along the Beyoğlu-Karaköy axis in Istanbul and brings together around 47 artists from more than 30 countries. 

A Concept Rooted in Resilience

The metaphor of the “three-legged cat” serves as more than a playful image — it suggests imbalance, adaptation and survival. Rather than a perfect tripod, the cat moves on uneven ground, reminding us that cultural production often happens in conditions of precarity and transition. It calls for a joining of legs — of time, place and people — to keep moving. The biennial uses this figure as a way to interrogate how art can respond to contemporaneous crises, urban shifts and the challenges of sustaining culture. 

Navigating Physical & Conceptual Terrain

Hosts such as Zihni Han, Elhamra Han, Galeri 77 and the Garden of the Former French Orphanage put art into architecture with histories of their own. The geographic layout — walkable but at times steep or maze-like — becomes part of the experience: the viewer must navigate not only artworks but terrain, memory and space. Some viewers may find the location transitions challenging or the sprawl ambitious; yet this very friction mirrors the biennial’s thematic concerns of disruption and navigation.

Works That Engage the Present & the Possible

Several standout pieces draw together personal, political and poetic threads:

  • Mona Benyamin’s video Tomorrow, again visualises the collapse of civility under pressured systems of violence, weaving news-footage style with intimate performative moments.

  • Sohail Salem’s Diaries from Gaza, drawings produced under siege and smuggled out, underscore the urgency of picture-making in contexts of survival.

  • Marwan Rechmaoui’s Chasing the Sun uses oversized toys, a seesaw, swing sets and Molotov cocktails to probe how childhood, play and conflict interweave in the social fabric.

Together, such works map a path between the imaginative and the real, the whimsical and the urgent.

Why This Biennial Matters

In a moment when large-scale art events often feel driven by tourism, branding or spectacle, the 18th Istanbul Biennial stakes a different claim: art as time, as process, as reflection. The multi-year structure allows the curatorial conversation to extend beyond exhibition weeks. It asks: how does culture persist? How can a city’s layered histories become material for thinking forward? How does an artwork breathe in a shifting urban and geopolitical terrain?

For Readers of Art & Culture

For any magazine devoted to art and culture, this biennial offers a rich subject: the intersection of contemporary practice with the architecture of a historic city; the collision of global art flows and local specificity; the interplay of form, politics and time. An article might consider: selection of venues, the metaphor of the three-legged cat, the viewer’s journey, the role of performance and video in this iteration, and how culture breathes in a city like Istanbul.